E14: A Deep Dive into Thrive Capital's Investment Strategy

[MUSIC] Welcome back to Turpentine VC, a podcast where we discuss the art and science of building successful venture firms. VC to VC. Today's guest on Turpentine VC is Karim of Thrive Capital. This is one of the most extensive conversations we've had on the show. Karim and I chat through the core insight that drove Thrive to invest in late stage companies like Stripe and Slack. How they approach thinking about fun size and timing, the benefits of a concentrated portfolio, and more. If you like what you hear, please do subscribe and leave us a review. We also started a companion newsletter, which sends the top three insights of each episode straight to your inbox. We'll link it below in the show notes. Without further ado, here's my interview with Karim. Karim, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining. Of course, thanks for having me, Eric. Karim, Thrive, I believe started in 2010, right? Yes, shortly after, but 2011 was our first institutional fund. So it's 12 years into the funds existence. How should we think about Thrive in context with some of the other great firms out there? What does Thrive want to be known for relative to the top firms in terms of how you guys think about the business and how you guys differentiate in the market? When Thrive started, Josh had the insight that venture and technology was potentially going from this niche asset class industry to technology becoming one of the strongest economic forces out there. And venture was potentially going to shift from a group of professional hobbyists or people backing science projects to what does it mean to really build consequential generational businesses or firms who were multi asset class. Tech was just one of the other verticals alongside health care and financial services and whatever else they invested in. There was an opportunity potentially for a new firm to come in that was seamlessly, singularly focused on tech. And we didn't want to miss the impact in the ripple that was being created by technology. And I think we took a stance on two things that we wanted to be a firm that was opportunistic and a firm that was concentrated on both people and ideas. And on the opportunistic lens, I think it was controversial at the time, but it really wanted to be that we want to invest in the category defining companies with multi decade tailings and that's all we cared about. And so we didn't want to be restricted from doing that because we were only focused on a certain stage or only folks on a certain geography or only folks on a certain sector. But we want to spend all our energy, all our lens, all our focus on what does it mean to identify these category defining companies that have long term runway. And then how can we support and kind of drive them along those journeys. And so I think that's with that orientation that we've kind of had since day one for thrive. As we've thought about building the firm and growing from there. And I think we've been fortunate to partner with a lot of those companies on that. And I learned a lot along the way, but our ambitions remain the same and you know, very quite grateful that we've been able to grow up as a firm as the industries grow. Yeah, it's fascinating that tension between the concentration and the opportunism because on the one hand, you guys, you know, you're all very concentrated in your in terms of a lot of capital into a few few companies and also the style, you know, and not that many investors. And so the style feels very tight, very focused, very focused on excellence. At the same time, you also do every stage, every geo you incubate every sector and it's opportunistic. It's a fascinating juxtaposition. How do you guys reconcile, you know, when you're talking about something, hey, is this opportunistic or is this focused? How do you balance that? Definitely. I think it's a great question. We actually get asked from LPs. We get asked from other folks as well. And I think where it comes down to is actually opportunistic doesn't mean lack of focus to us. It actually means extreme focus. And so I think in an effort to try to structure your lens and approach, you might try to start putting constraints on it. But I think what would that happen is it potentially over complicates the decision. And so I think the thing about being opportunistic is to say we're looking for one type of company. It's these product led category leading companies that are winning in really, really big markets and writing exceptional tailwinds that can really carry and kind of either blow up a market or transforming existing one. And so that's me and into our team ends up to be very clarifying because there are a lot of good companies out there. There are a lot of interesting companies out there. There are a lot of companies you can invest in and make money behind. But if we sat here and had a conversation, the probably very few companies we'd say, wow, that's writing a 20 or 30 year tailwind. That is the clear number one in the category while they've broken out in a way that's going to be hard to kind of defend against and kind of play through. And so that's our first lens. It's very qualitative in nature. Now, I think with that said, we try to reinforce all those things with quantitative things to kind of drive our assumptions through that. And I think that's a bit of how thrive is born being born in New York, where we thought the opportunity for new companies to be created was going to be there. But I think it ended up creating this blend of East Coast and West Coast thinking in style East Coast and being quantitative and analytic and understanding people observe what's happening in these markets being top down a lot of ways. And West Coast was just like a deep admiration for the magic that product can be and how that can kind of just totally change the face of an industry with the founder having a unique product vision. But potentially avoiding just backing science projects that don't have a business model that can really accelerate and transform a market and build an enduring company that lasts the test of time. And so I think being balanced in New York having just like a natural appreciation for that kind of drove us on that journey. I think your second point on having a lean team helps kind of maintain the way to kind of invest that has a little bit of tension in the way that that you talked about. Because when you lean there's ability to be collaborative and engage across the dimensions. I think as you get really large you need to become a little bit more systemized and rigid because you want to make sure everyone's on the same page. Everyone's rowing in the same direction. Everyone's looking for the same types of companies and the quality bars the same. But our whole investment team is nine people kind of across all stages of firm and we're looking all for the same type of company. And so it's not like our early stage team is looking for pioneering frontier tech and our growth teams looking for de-risk sass. We're all looking for the same types of companies. We just maybe intersect them at different moments. And that leads to a lot of clarity and communication to be able to drive forward living this ambiguity of not looking for a business that scaled from one to five or four or ended with a magic number of 1.2. But a bit of that the magic and the and the specialness that comes with something where you're like product intersected market intersected founder to kind of break through. And that's where we spend a lot of our time and energy and we feel fortunate to be able to kind of collaborate because we're in it living and and I logging about it every day. Yeah, talk more about how you guys thought about the structure of the firm, right? Not a ton of of investors mentioned just nine, you know, generalist firm. You know, we had a 16 Z on and they talked about their sort of specialist fund to fund structure. Obviously they've scaled up their team massively on the investing side. I believe 20 something but more so on the on the support side, I think almost 500 employees. What do you believe that that firms like them don't necessarily believe in terms that's led you to keep a very tight investing team. And you know, generalist firm and not skilled team size more broadly get into the sort of pros and cons trade offs that you think you guys have made. We have a lot of admiration for a 16 Z and we think they're doing a great thing across the industry and a lot of respect for what they're building. I think from our standpoint and what worked well for our personalities and our team and where we're kind of sitting in this journey was we really wanted to be able to be thought partners to the founders through every moment of what they were doing. And I think also in our DNA and so first value is like we are builders and we want to be at the earliest moments. There's company sometimes we incubate them co-found companies as you talked about. We've done that about a dozen times or we invest early in their journey or sometimes we invest a little bit later, even if the valuations a little bit higher. We still think they're early in transforming their industries and we see kind of impact to those businesses, you know, a decade or two decades almost in to their journey. And and so for us to kind of be a part of that journey, we wanted not just the firm to be generalist but for the individuals within the firm to be generalists to have the exposure at the early to have the exposure at the building foundation and moment because it made it much more intimate. It wasn't that you were just part of building a company 10 or 15 years ago actually living it daily and all of our investors spend time building companies as well as well as spending time thinking about what does it take for a company that's reached a few hundred million of error to get to a billion of error or to get the billion of revenue and then continue to kind of push there and hold it all in one mind because our impression is that the founder journeys a lonely journey. Yes, you have executives yes, you have people around the table, but usually it falls on the CEO or the founders to have to make the call and they might have someone they talk to who talks about product with them and they'll talk to someone else who tells them about oh this is how you should do better market. They'll talk to someone else about well this is what you need to do before you go public and that's on the founders to internalize all those data points and then try to make that decision and they feel alone in that journey. And I think a big part is how do we create an investing mindset that really mimics that founder journey one because we literally found companies but two because we're thinking and bouncing all those elements as the company grows and we're never going to be like well now your series be company you're kind of beyond me. You talk to someone else because yes that's here's be investor might know certain things but they probably don't appreciate that early product magic that's needed to kind of create something new and how do you balance that around that or you might have an early stage investor appreciates that but they don't know how how do you take a product direction. direction near it with a go-to-market strategy that can really scale and blow up at a market because you have your window. now. And so how can we kind of sit in that tension kind of support along that? And so we have the only way to do that would have a lean one team that kind of sees and does all those things. And I think it also aligns back to our first point, which is we want to keep the main thing the main thing around we want to be category defining companies with long-term tailwinds. And I think the more zoomed out we can be, the better will be about identifying it. I think technology we view as a tectonic shift across all industries. And we don't think it moves uniformly through all industries at the same time. We think there are moments of time where social media and the internet is exploding and there's other times where fintechs exploding and other times where healthcare is really expanding and obviously these moments are on AI now. And you can see each industry is kind of evolving at different pieces. And so we ought to be able to zoom out to see where there's the most activity, the most opportunity for transformation and then be able to kind of dive in and drive that forward. I think the summary of that actually, Nithin, who's the executive chairman at Thrive, who's the dean of HBS, probably has the most robust encyclopedia of knowledge of businesses being created as well as having just a great beginner's mindset. You know, he always says we want to build, you know, we want to be a T-shaped firm, which I can kind of see broad. And then when we see that ripple that we think is going to extend for 20 years, how do we become, you know, leading experts or thought leaders in that to be able to be valuable as partners and identify the leading companies? Some of you mentioned I want to highlight it feels like a core insight that you had going in late with a lot of capital to companies like Stripe and Slack and a bunch of others is that these companies are going to be bigger than people think and not just a lot of capital, but maybe higher prices than maybe some other firms were willing to pay. Only to talk about what exactly that core insight was and how you came to it. Part of it was the industry was going through an interesting inflection point and evolution where obviously eventually we've been around for a long time and we'd seen a certain level of outcomes. And I think you were starting to see obviously with companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon that these things can go a lot larger. And then I think it became clear that technology wasn't just an important part of the business. It was a job business for a lot of industries and that it was going to have to be a competitive advantage in how you operate. And I think at the same time too, we saw these businesses breaking into traditional industries really for the first time where maybe you could set early days of ensure we're selling tech companies, selling tech to other tech companies, which was effective but maybe limited the tam a little bit. And then it's the tam just went from that universe, which obviously was condensed around Silicon Valley to the global GDP. And I think as we started to see a lot of those companies kind of cross those casings, kind of break across industries, all the Fortune 500 needs to transform itself. We just thought, wow, this is the big camera in explosion. This is the moment where we're going to see a lot of these things extend. And then I think we had a fundamental belief that scale in tech winners was going to look different than scale. And if you're a retail player or a bank where you saw market share split between five or 15 people, we thought there would be compounding advantages to product, compounding advantages to human capital that gets attracted to that. And that there's going to be a higher discernment in terms of product that end users were going to get to decide and pick and we kind of saw the everything kind of being top down, sold monolithic to best of being created. And so all these things we thought was a confluence of the market size and the opportunity was going to really continue to break out. And some examples you talk about, Stripe, we invested in the company almost a decade ago. We also led another round in the company today and kind of continue recently this year and continue to invest behind it. And that's a company that's been almost 15 years into the journey. And you look at the market of global payments and Stripes 2% of that market. Despite I think it's dominance and growth. And even if you include it with its competitive counterparts of Audi and or PayPal, you'd say there are five or six percent of that market. And so when you kind of step back and look at, is that whole market going to transform to modern payment acquires over the next three decades? Absolutely. And so that five or six percent can become 15, 20, 25, 30 over time. And you've seen this market kind of form around three leaders who have kind of invested to to win and kind of catalyze that shift to date. And I think in a similar way, we've obviously seen the explosion of cloud, which has driven a bunch of these services around, you know, when Thrive started, what we cloud spending was, you know, a couple percent, or maybe I think it was like 10 billion of revenue. Now we got approaching 500 billion of revenue and flipping maybe across the 50% threshold. And so that's a thesis you would have seen all the see for over a decade. And you'd say, wow, we're about 50% penetrated in some of these things. Obviously, it's creating new and newer use cases. And I think that, again, maybe what is a bit of the blend of a lot of us came from traditional finance. We were in New York, but we had this deep appreciation for what were the leaders were. And so we were able to kind of see and assess these markets and knew what the incumbents kind of sat in position. But also had the belief that the innovators, everything was kind of going to go their way if they were kind of the clear leaders and exciting markets. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word of our sponsors. It is impressive that your New York based firm, and yet you're in many of these companies, you know, most recently retro, that are very designed and very product, you're very San Francisco. And so you have managed to bridge New York NSF while being a New York based firm. And it's not like someone works at Thrive, built one of these companies. Josh Miller was an example of a person who did and maybe there's a couple others I missed. But it's impressive that you've been able to make that balance happen while not having a San Francisco presence, either a physically or in terms of a partner on your team who spent 20 years building one of these companies. Yeah. San Francisco is a big part of where we invest behind. And I think New York is a quarter ethos DNA, obviously, believe in the long term opportunities in the ecosystem. We've continuously grown. We continue believe that it's going to grow. But obviously the center of innovation since the start has kind of been San Francisco. And we believe it was be a really important part of the ecosystem. And so someone from the teams out there probably every week. And we like being in New York, as we fancy ourselves as independent thinkers. And so it's nice to kind of be outside and be able to kind of select where we want to spend time and and and really pursue. I think to your point on some of the companies you're talking about, this is not throwing shade against San Francisco, I think New York as a city has a lot of taste. Yeah. I think that translates. Exactly. And the aesthetic and the intersection of fashion and industries kind of coming together. And so I think that's been part of, you know, thrives DNA from the start as well. And you know, we were backing a lot of technology about e-commerce, Cubsick Warby Parker and Harry's and Glacier that I think kind of brought that essence of how technology can transform an industry. But it wasn't all tech. It was obviously having taste and brand and be able to position around that and give a fresh face to an industry or, you know, we're seeing if investors and schemes. But as well as we invested an Instagram early days and the big part of that was the aesthetic of what Kevin was building. Obviously, the data was super impressive. But it's having an opinion about what consumers want. And so that's something that we've always indexed to and actually New York's been an advantage for some disadvantage in that. Yeah, no, it's well said. It's not like San Francisco engineers have a monopoly on on taste or design sensibility. I want to talk about selling and how you guys think about selling because you do different forms of different views on this. For those who don't know us, like we try to keep to ourselves a little bit. We don't really have a website. We don't blog or tweet. We occasionally do these podcasts. Thank you for for having me and letting us kind of share our story and have this conversation. And so if I if I, if I sum down to one thing and then I'll kind of expand to that and is, you know, we've grown by doing everything we can to support our founders, building a strong reputation in market and in return, our founders voluntarily have gone to bat for us. And we built the reputation in market that we've been great thought partners, great supporters. Some of the most instrumental people around the table had supported them in some of the important junctures of the business to get to where they are today. And the founders are always the star of the movie in our view. And that's a big part of why we're quiet. We try to be behind the scenes. Obviously, there's some advantage for people knowing who you are. But at the same time, we don't want to ever run the risk that we confuse who's important here and start to chase that instead of actually spending all our time and energy, delivering value for our founders and supporting them in building the journey and transforming their industries through that. If I had to guess kind of like what founders say that resonates with other founders from the journey, I think on the early stage, I think one of the things that really stands out is we are builders and we're building now. And I think there's a deep resonance with early stage founders who are in that moment and we're in it in a similar moment. And it's not to say that the building of our company is identical to each company that comes across. I've been a part of co-founding a few healthcare companies and even in the moment of co-founding Cedar, which sells to health systems and working with another incubation cadence that sells to health systems. There's a lot that we can learn from that, but also there's a lot that's going to be new and get created and you have to have an open beginner's mindset to kind of continue to drive that. And then I think at the growth stages, what I think really resonates with folks is that we're still business builders even at that growth stage. No founder starts their business because they want to talk about the P&L or their CAC payback or their LTV to CAC or how all their sales reps are hitting quota. They start a business because they want to solve a problem that's deeply personal to them or that they're deeply inspired to go solve. Well, they see a market that needs to be transformed and changed and they think that they're the ones to go do that. And that's how they want to think about their business at the early stages, but also the growth stages. And so yes, we know how to do all that math. Like I said, we grew up in traditional finance, spend time private equity of lots of people who spend time at Goldman and Bridgewater and other places before joining Thrive. But fundamentally when we have a conversation with growth founder, it's about the qualitative narrative about the product they're building, about the market that they're going after. but the long-term vision and opportunity. And that founder doesn't stop becoming a founder just because they're a series D company. You know, that's the magic in part of the DNA and allows us to build some of these most consequential big companies because they don't stop thinking like a founder. And so we don't think the investor should stop thinking in that same aligned lens just because now there's numbers. And how do we kind of incorporate that? And support the qualitative narrative versus having the quantitative lead the story and have the qualitative follow behind that. And so I think there's a lot of resonance with late stage founders as we've kind of shown up with that because we're aligned with their vision and what they want to build their company. I love that. Let me get more concrete and ask you as an investor and investors listening into this. You know, in our share portfolio, we have a lot of, as you and Corrin, I also have scale AI and applied intuition and a few others where there are opportunities to let the win is ride or also take some liquidity back and distribute it to my OPs. Do you thrive, have a philosophy or if you were advising me as a fund manager on how to think about or how to have a framework for when to let it ride versus when to provide liquidity or distributions, what would you recommend? How should I think about it? I don't know if there's a set playbook around it. I mean, and that's going to be a constant thing. I'm thrive that might be a little bit frustrating in some of these conversations. We don't believe in playbooks. We don't believe in rules. We don't believe in structure around some of these things. I think we have shared frameworks that we approach things. We have, as Nithin says, this experience is nothing more than a starting hypothesis. And so we have some experiences that then land is jumping off points. But I think our instinct is to be a part of these companies for the long term and see how that journey plays out. A lot of these companies were already been a part of for a decade as we talked about Stripe and then investing more now. And so it's not like we're looking to sell. It's the opposite of that. There's also times though in the moment of journey. We are a fund where a company's kind of IPO, it's scaled. It's sometimes the founder moves on and there's a new CEO in the business. Sometimes it was our appropriate time for us to start to transition and sell a bit in those opportunities. And that's something that we've done selectively in the past, especially I think in 2021 when we felt like studies companies and even the founder might be valued three or four years ahead. And it was a responsible thing to kind of distribute to LPs. But we actually evaluate each one of these companies on a one-by-one basis. We don't just wait for the end of the lock-up and then distribute, I think in all cases, we kind of waited and kind of evaluated throughout that journey. Our view is that you should have an opinion on everything and that you shouldn't have some default thing even that feels comfortable. At the end of the day, you should be willing to face the uncomfortable question, make the decision. And for us, I think partly because it's not unfamiliar for us to be investing at the growth stages. And so the fact that this company IPO's, we view that as a moment in the journey and not necessarily the lasting but an important financing obviously in that journey. And we're not unfamiliar with thinking about these things at the later stages. And so I think we're more comfortable kind of sitting in that. I think if you spend all your time in the early stages, I can understand why it's kind of hard to have an opinion. And so who am I to say that the public markets are right or wrong on this valuation as soon as my lock-up senate? And I'm totally sympathetic to that view as well. Yeah. I want to segue into talking about the history of the firm or the evolution of the firm. And what are kind of the different forks in the road that you've had along the way you can imagine a different universe where sort of you chose a different path and thrive as a different structure. One thing, for example, you guys had to think about was fun size. And what is the right fun size at the right time and how you guys approach that? What are the different phases of thrive over the past 12 years or the different forks in the road that you've taken? Definitely. So I think from the start, just from the lens, we want to be opportunistic when we're part of these companies. But our first institutional fund was $40 million. And so it wasn't necessarily that we were set up to do a lot of these big opportunities. But with that said, we did invest an Instagram in a growth round out of that $40 million fund and concentrated into that and incubated companies out of that first fund with Oscar Health Insurance and invested in series A's, like Warby Parker, on that journey. And so I think a lot of that thread stayed through. And I think we did fortunate that we had to support a lot of long-term LPs from the early days. Large endowments who really believed in us who understood that journey, even though it might sound crazy at the size of our fund that we'd be able to kind of step into these things. And I think the fact that the trust that we kind of communicated what we wanted to do, that we were consistent in it, and that we were seemingly doing a good job at it, built more and more confidence to help us to kind of scale and do that at bigger and bigger scale to support our companies. I think the second thing is that we didn't have a number in mind for what funds size we wanted to raise. And but part of those we responded to the market and the growth in the space. We never, we want the fund size to be an output of our strategy and output from what we're seeing in the market and the opportunities. They're not the other way around where you raise a fund and then you figure out, hey, how am I going to deploy this in a way that's successful? And so I'd say that we scaled with the industry, but I don't know if we were the first always to raise the largest fund. I think a lot of it was we responding to the opportunities we saw at hand. And consistently we found more opportunities than our fund size would necessarily support. And so we'd be fundraising a little bit earlier. And so we'd raise a little bit larger and then turns out the opportunities continued to scale. And that's the path that we've been on. And so I can't say intentionally that our fund size kind of scaled through that. But I think a couple realization that works in the road. I think as the funds grew, it was controversial to keep it as one team. And we've even split the funds between growth and early. But that's more of a mechanism for discussion internally. And we want to have clarity around discussion. On lenses, we want to be intersection as companies as early as possible. And so it was really important to us that we gave as much intention as focus to the seed stage company that we're talking about. Then we would kind of leading a growth stage opportunity. And so we wanted to separate the funds and make sure we were concentrated in each. Because I think concentration leads to conviction. And conviction leads to us making kind of the best investments in outcomes. And so actually, if you look at a lot of our funds, we're probably twice as concentrated. I'm both the early and the growth side relative to other funds. And we think that leads to better outcomes, better decision making. But also we think it leads to better alignment with the founder. For the founder and for the early employees, this is the most meaningful commitment they've ever made in their entire career. And they're all in on it. And I don't think it's fair for the investor to approach it as one of 50 investments that maybe they made in that fund. And if it works, that's awesome. And if it doesn't work, I can kind of step away from it in a way. And we want to be financially bound to it. But we also think it makes us emotionally bound to these companies as well. Because we're not investing in that many. We're concentrated in it. And the higher bar for concentration creates more conviction. Which I think leads to better discussions internally when we're trying to drive that forward versus, oh, this could work. So let's write a check. When we write a seed state check, we're writing with conviction that we think this is going to be an enduring company over a long period of time. Now that we think this company can get to a series A, and then we're going to figure it out from there. And I think that's a bit of an important strategic decision that as one team, but separate funds to kind of keep the focus on early stage, the attention around early stage, and not let that get lost in some of the larger checks we're doing, and how that be the anchoring point for how we think about investing at Thrive was an important one. I think the next big decision that we made was we've invested a lot in building a portfolio impactee. And how do we support our companies along that journey? And I think that came from two realizations. One is that these companies are going to be built over a longer period of time. They're going to be bigger, which means they're going to be more complex. I think the idea that an investor can be all things to the company is kind of outdated. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago, when these companies were being built for three or four years, they're going to get flipped to an acquisition Cisco, or find a quick pack to exit. You could seemingly as the investing board member know everything, or be a really good thought partner in some of those journeys. But now as a founder, starting a company inspired by a lot of the iconic companies that have come before them, when they started that journey, they want to be able to company for 10 years, which means even in year one and two, they're thinking about how do I build that infrastructure, how do I build an executive team, how do I build a product, how do I build a go-to-market motion that's going to really help scale and drive that through. And so can I help you think about your go-to-market motion and how to break out territories or pricing or incentives or help you hire a CFO? I'm probably OK at it, but am I the best the world? Definitely not. And so we've really built an impact team that has world-class leaders, leading across pillars and dimensions to kind of support our companies. And I know that's an insight that I think a lot of firms have had, and started to build some services. But we were intentional about calling an impact team, because I think how we approach that's a little bit different. But they're all stemmed from the place that these companies should be built for longer. We're going to be concentrating these journeys, and maybe we'll all have support and drive that along the way. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a worth of our sponsors. And what you've had to come to terms with in your concentration strategy is that there's going to be just a lot of companies you're going to miss and not be a part of and not have a small stake in, but it's in service of this brand that you're building, which is when you're in, you're not hedging, you're all in, you're leading, you're taking a big chunk of it. And that's kind of the thrive brand promise. Definitely. And I think you look at that and say, well, well, you may miss some deals because you're focused on trying to be concentrated. And I think our view actually found that the best founders want their investors to be all in on that. And we're not in there. And we're not going to be like, we're going to walk away from this deal over 1,5% or something like that. If we have that conviction, and we see it with the founder, we can be flexible in some of these conversations. What we're not flexible on is lack of conviction. And we want to founders decided to be on that journey with us. And we found that they found it refreshing that we want to be concentrated, that we want to be along the journey that we want to invest throughout. And that comes from a deep place of conviction because we've gotten to know them, and we've got to know their market and opportunity. And so you can-- You could argue that this is a disadvantage. I think we found that it's put us much more in it, an advantage. But I think you said another important thing, which is back to this clarifying thing about opportunistic. We just want to be in the category to finding companies with long-term tailwinds. That is very clarifying in that we're really looking for these excellent breakout companies. And I think so much energy can be spent on investment fund thinking about, this is a good company, this is a great company, is this a 2.8x return, is this a 3.2x return? And you might spend so much energy around that you're distracted from actually looking at the things that are real breakout. And so we pass on a lot of companies that are good and great. We know they are. But because we're in search of just trying to be focused on the excellent companies around it. And there's a lot of companies that turn out to be excellent that we were just uncertain of at that moment. And we're willing to trade off not being a part of every great company if the companies we are a part of are great. And hopefully increasing a time where we're better and better at not missing those excellent companies that came our way. And we just happened not to invest at that moment. Yeah, and I bet there's companies that are probably who missed early, but you got later. When it became more obvious and the value prop that you've cultivated as a market. And we're very thankful to all those founders who are great just enough to let us into the opportunity after passing it later. Yes. On the impact team, what have you found as founders care the most about that's guided you in terms of where you invested on the-- like is it recruiting, is it customers? Like, what is your thinking for what do founders want and how have you cultivated the impacts in around that? So just to highlight why we call it maybe the impact team and other portfolio services team that I think sometimes they get referred to. And it feels like a small thing. But some of these small things become big things in guiding lights and how we operate. We really wanted it to drive impacts. And so to your point, it's really centered around our founders and how we deliver value to our founders versus potentially another trap we were trying to avoid was we have a set of services and founders can come to it and hopefully it's helpful. But we're pushing out a set of services to the market. And we hope that it adds value. And it's a different lens, which is like, what are the biggest problems that our founders have? And how do we kind of jump in and solve it? And so I can talk about the range of services, but maybe I'll talk about one service that I know a lot of firms have and maybe how our approach is to market, which is talent. I think a lot of people support their companies around talent. An example could be a founder, had a company that grew 10x in a year. And they're basically-- the business scaling and it got way more financially complex than they thought. And they quickly need to hire a new VP of finance or a CFO. And they're kind of freaking out because this is like way more intense than they thought in an area that they've probably should have paid more attention to sooner. And I think typical journey would be-- you have a network of CFOs or VP of finances. You send them their way. You may be connected to a recruiter. I think-- I've seen this lots of time with our team. I think the reaction from Thrive is, we're in your office meeting with you that night. Katie leads our talent team. We live in Alexa who embed and kind of work closely with these companies. They probably already know the culture and history and DNA of your company because they helped you scale from 30 to 150 employees, which was part of this hyper growth ramp. They're obviously connecting to your recruiter and helping you calibrate. But they're probably out cold sourcing the next two weeks because they don't want to wait till that recruiter gets set up and starting to get you in front of many people as possible, because we know this is urgent. And in the meantime, obviously, where you're trying to figure this out, your finances are totally in disarray. And you showed up who leads our finance pillar. At Thrive is going to embed at your company, a CFO, for the next couple of months, and really kind of supports you through this critical journey. And so one, you have the time, but two, the head space, to kind of figure these things out. And hopefully in the meantime, your business is feel stabilized and avoids kind of a negative loop that can get created in some of these really crucial moments. And that's an error that I've seen happen at least three or four times off top of my heads, kind of supporting companies. And similar stories across go to market and brand and communication, as well as data and analytics kind of across our companies, which each one of those have executives who have, you know, almost a decade of experience kind of leading functions. But the goal here is, again, not that, here's my services, here's what I know. It's what's your problem? How do we do everything we can to support and drive that? And that's not a thick of the intentionality or on the impact team, which Nibial's kind of had division for lead and steward it through a bunch of these changes. I want to segue into incubations, because that's something that you guys invested in since the very beginning. When are you talk about how you think about incubations? Where's your sort of unfair advantage relative to incubations and how you've kind of refined it over the years in terms of, what's worth incubating, what's not, et cetera, how you've built your practice? - Well, I incubation wasn't intentional for us. I think we're even a little sensitive around the name incubation because other people do it. I think we take it more as co-founding. We don't want to be seen as we're building the company and then hiring a CEO and see opposite. These are founder-led companies. You know, amazing founders that we get to work with. And we like to feel like we're an important part of that journey, but we are still a part of it. And we're not the ones kind of running that show and they control the companies and drive it forward. It really stemmed from thrive, having a proactive mentality and a builder's mindset. And we felt entrepreneur, we were building thrive the firm. So that in one hand, it was some of the things that kind of drove the early DNA of the team, which we've continued to maintain. As I said, like our first value is we are builders. It's a really important mentality and everyone at the firm is touching kind of our incubations and building in certain way, but also they're touching how we build the firm and thrive. And we don't want thrive to be a static entity. We want to be evolving organism. And everyone's really contributing to that across all different functions. So we've always had kind of that entrepreneurial mindset. And I think maybe part of being in New York and having to go to San Francisco and work our way into opportunities, we were also just proactive about what are interesting markets. We knew someone wasn't gonna sell in dust, the hot deal. We knew someone wasn't gonna send them the best company in their seed portfolio. So we had to be thinking, what are these big ways? What are these big moments? What are these big markets that could yield an exciting company so we could get ahead of it so we could reach out and get proactive 'cause we knew it wasn't gonna come to us. And in that journey, we realized there were some really exciting tailwinds that we got very passionate about, but there were no companies building. And so even early in the founding moments of thrive, like Josh had co-founded Oscar, but since then we've kind of found it in a dozen companies that really stems from that moment. And it's been a journey that won we really enjoy. Two, I like to think that we're good at, four of those companies are worth more than a billion dollars and a lot of those are still early in their journey. And so hopefully it'll get there over time. And three, I think it really aligns with our principle of concentration. I mean, there's no more concentration than saying, I'm gonna help co-found and build a company. We dedicate a lot of time, obviously we put reputational risk around these businesses and what we're kind of committed to. And we put a lot of energy and concentration from the team. And so it's not just the investors kind of all in on this, but all the different functions of thrive are in the early days trying to get these businesses out with real velocity. And I think the things that get me excited about what we're doing here even more than maybe some of the headline valuations of some of our incubations is that a lot of repeat founders are working with us on these opportunities that even started with the first one Oscar. Mario is a co-founder of OS2 and that's how Josh and him got to know each other. But from Brandon Webber who started Navar, Florian, and Cedar, or Chris from Cadence, all repeat founders who are excited to kind of partner with us early in that journey, which gets me excited that we're offering real value and kind of driving that forward. And I have some suspicions as like a co-founder why we're able to kind of help these businesses really succeed. But we're just grateful that we have to work with great founders on problems we're super passionate about. And is it fair to say that you guys you've focused more so on regulated industries or capital intensive industries or how have you thought about the types of ideas or spaces where you think this is best set up to succeed? Definitely. I'm going to keep coming back to the knowing line of there's no playbooks and so it's evolving. But there is some pattern in the history and I can talk about how it's moving over time. The pattern is we did do a lot of regulated industries in healthcare and fine services, some of the healthcare companies I talked about. We started the Gourubon our team and you created a co-branded credit card. And I think a big part of why we incubate companies or why we've been good co-founders with founders is a couple things. I think one, it takes a lot of time to start something. So we're only going to start something if it can be a $10 billion plus company, not a billion plus company because it's so much more time and energy and so we got to believe that there's more output on the other head. Two, we want to be inspired by the problem in a really big way because we're going to spend a lot of time on it. We better feel this one of the most meaningful things that we can kind of go spend time on. And so we're really passionate about the companies that we help start and engage. It's not just financial math for us. It's really a passion project. That's the only way to justify the time. And also to overcome that initial zero to one moment because if you're totally rational about it, you'll never start the company. Because you have to have like an unrealistic optimism to kind of jump over. And so you got to be super passionate about it and kind of turn off a little bit of your totally rational line and really let your optimism in the motion kind of take you forward. But and then third obviously we have work with great founders because ideas only get you so far. And so like why has that ended up us kind of going after somebody's regulated industries is one of the advantages of having a capital partner that has a conviction of a co-founder is you can think of much more direct path and a much bigger path to some of these problems. And so if you're building like a small tool, you could probably get away with an MVP on like half a million dollars or a million dollars. You want to build a health insurance? company, you want to build a robust enterprise solution for health systems. You want to build a PBM and take on the big three PBM pharmacies in the market. You want to build a co-branded credit card and take on Chase and AMX and all these players and go partner and get a top 20 retailer to be your anchor customer to kind of deliver some of these things. You're going to need money and you're going to need conviction and you're going to be able to take a direct path there and not feel like I have to build a small little MVP, build something else, build grow and go after it. You want to be able to take on that, build towards it and be able to capitalize it in a way that's going to kind of drive it forward and feel like you have a real partner on the table that has conviction to do that. And so I think that wasn't by design but ended up that we were able to to help accelerate some of these really bold visions. Allow great founders to take a direct path there and take some big swings and we get a lot of energy from that. Now I think so of our co-foundings that are in this public, we're starting to take a different direction on certain things. Again, it wasn't intentional. It wasn't like, well, we've been successful in healthcare and fight services. Should we keep doing that? And we're launching a couple of companies in AI now in that space and we think we have unique insights and ways to kind of catalyze that and a lot of advantage to those founders for us having to have a capital partner as a co-founder but also someone who has seen the business building journey in a lot of different ways. Let's go deeper on healthcare specifically because you've really flourished in building that practice, you specifically among other things. And when you talk about both on the investing side, how you've approached the space in terms of what types of things have gotten you excited versus not get excited in terms of advice for investing in digital health. And then we'll segue into how we're building these types of companies different than building traditional Silicon Valley companies or tech companies in particular. >> As a several generalists, we spend a lot of time in a lot of different spaces. At the same time, we're t-shaped. And so there's certain areas that we might spend a lot of time in kind of drive in because we think there's a space that has long-term tailwinds. And my view is we're one decade of five decades into the digital health transformation. I mean, I can go sum up all the digital health revenue or enterprise value, whatever metric you want to use. And it basically rounds to zero in terms of the impact in the healthcare ecosystem. That's not despite amazing products being built. That's not despite actually great companies being built so far. But it is just a reflection on the fact of how big healthcare is. And it's a $4.5 trillion part of our economy. It's the fourth largest GDP in the world if you separate its size of Germany. And so I think we're really early in some of these things. But I think what's super promising is that on the ground, there's real innovation. I mean, lots of companies with a part of, lots of companies have just seen that are transforming health outcomes, that are lowering costs dramatically for the system, that are streamlining experiences for consumers and employers and all these different elements. And so that gets me massively optimistic. But then I also look at the hill to climb, there's a lot to do. And so we get excited about being on that journey and helping build in the line and drive that forward. I think to your point on the approach to the market, I think that there are general rules in tech that maybe don't apply to building a health tech company. And that's something we've kind of learned over time and used in the companies we've incubated, but also companies we've invested behind. And I think the first thing is, I think you got to build alongside the system or within where the system is today and not just ignore the system completely and build outside of it. Sometimes there's an instinct to be kind of the outsider in the space and say I'm just going to build over here. But again, like a $4.5 trillion system, that's not going to move so quickly to your little startup, regardless of how good the idea is. You've got to go meet the system where it is today. And you got to go operate in existing payment models. You got to go operate where the patients are today. You got to go operate within the dollars and flows that exist in the ecosystem. Now it's not to say that we're satisfied with the status quo. You should build a company that's much better in a value-based world than is a fee for service world. But if you're holding your breath to the whole market, most of value-based, it's healthcare is going to be more stubborn than your business has longevity to kind of like stamina to kind of play through it. And so you got to go meet the system today and kind of go build on those economic rails where the patients are and kind of deliver that, which I think is maybe a little counter to maybe a lot of people's initial starting point where they're like, I'm just going to build a cash pay business. I don't want to deal with insurance. I don't want to deal with health systems. I don't want to deal with employers. And the reality is you're just going to be a small part of that market in the best-case scenario. And in the worst-case scenario, you're just not going to be able to kind of get it off the ground. I think the second thing is I think we challenge the concept that like you should start with an MVP in healthcare. We actually think you should go after big problems, not small problems. And part of it is I think we're early in transforming healthcare. So we should why not go after the big problems that haven't been solved yet versus settling for something smaller. But too, I don't think the industry set up to take on small parts of solution. And so you run the risk of trying to fix a small part of the system that actually doesn't fix the whole problem. And so you didn't actually drive the impact that you wanted to your end user or end customer at the end of the day. And so why do we build a health insurance company versus just build some software? For Oscar, it's because there were so many pieces that needed to be integrated both from tech and operations to build a better experience for consumers. Why do we help right-wave build a PBM? It's because you couldn't just build an optimizing layer in terms of the structure because the incentives were messed up, the formularies were messed up. And you wanted to integrate a lot of your own services with the infrastructure, with the consumer interface to really transform that. And so if you just you ran the risk of just changing one piece of that, one, you might not get traction. But two, even if you did, where you're really going to move the needle on the outcomes that we're going to be created. And so we've really strived for backing big problems versus small problems in healthcare, which I know runs antithetical to some of this to start with the MDP in scale. And I think the last thing is I think you have to get quickly out of the mindset of building for your friends and your neighbors. But I think a lot of these companies are built in the tech centers, like New York and San Francisco. But healthcare is spread across the entire country. And if we're going to start at the first point, which is like we don't want to just build valuable companies that are worth a couple billion dollars. We want to build companies that actually change the face of healthcare and make a dent in the trajectory of healthcare. You're going to have to find a way to serve a hundred million patients. And you're not going to be able to do that without serving people across the country in Ohio, where I'm from, or in Kansas, or Louisiana, or in all the different places across the country. And so how do you start thinking about how do I build a product that doesn't just can sell to the big tech companies who want to buy fancy digital health things for their employees? Again, that's not bad. It could be a great business. But I think we're more inspired by people who want to build products for a hundred million users and cedar the consumer healthcare payments business. That's something that's serving 30 million patients today. And we led the series A and a company headway in the mental health space. We believe that mental health was going to be a really important thing. The thing that really inspired us at headway even when it was at a fraction of the scale that it was today was that in New York, the most represented employer that they served was the MTA. And that was because the transportation authority was the biggest employer in New York. So they were representative of the population. And that gave us a lot of confidence that they were going to kind of scale across the country because we're like mental health. That's a hundred million person problem. We got to go find a way to be able to deliver that. And even if there's other ways to be able to build good financial outcomes, we want to be a part of the things that can really actually move the needle in healthcare and hopefully change the trajectory of healthcare, you know, bankrupting our country, being kind of a big financial burden and frustration for consumers, being an opaque system for employers. The list of healthcare problems are endless. And so hopefully we can obviously build great financial outcomes, but really make a dent in how that, in the trajectory of where it is now. I want to segue a bit to macro. There's some firms that don't think a ton about macro in the sense of they're just focused on investing in great companies and don't change the pace of deployment or don't change the fun size because they don't see a huge sort of correlation companies are built in all great markets. And there are other firms who are very conscious of the macro. It changes what types of companies they invest in or they're in deployment pacing or their fun size is off-adversified. You sort of reduce their fund significantly. How does the drive think about macro in terms of how it determines their business? Yeah. I'd say we think a lot and we think a little about it. And so I think we'll a lot in that should this change any of our long-term assumptions is the trajectory of technology different than we thought. It's a profitability of technology businesses different than we thought. It is the efficiency to kind of get there a lot different than we thought. Are the existing markets more stubborn than we thought? It's capital a lot more expensive than we thought. And in some cases those change our assumptions, some cases they don't. I think our belief in technology transforming every industry is still unwavoring. I mean we still see the bottoms of momentum across our portfolio across a lot of companies that the industry is changing. I think some of the things that are really changing as the cost of capital is a lot different. And so strategy that made sense for a company in a zero interest rate world does not make sense in this world. And so to put your head under a rock and say macro doesn't matter I'm going to run my company the same way is delusional. And there's a smart way to kind of run your company in this environment. And we spend a lot of time with our companies doing that. Now what we don't do is over-correct until our companies to give up the long-term prize of what they're going after. And to not keep investing in their business. There's a way to grow your business profitably. And it's not this zero sum. Should I grow or should I cut burn? We don't view them as mutually exclusive. We think it's a multi-dimensional question. And maybe the way the firm structure to work comfortable playing in multi-dimensional. We do it all the time. We build companies, investor-ly, investor growth. We invest across categories. Being part of a builder means that you have to constantly make these multi-dimensional questions as you grow your company. And so we live in that ambiguity and help our companies think about how can they grow profitably. I think where that's led from an investing standpoint is that we've made investments. We're again, not ignoring what we think maybe multiples are going to be. If I was to humbly say that like, I think we maybe didn't believe that 40 times revenue was going to exist forever. So we didn't necessarily underwrite our companies to that. At the same time, we don't think five X revenue multiples will exist forever. And so we kind of view that things will kind of revert to kind of where they were long term. I know there's some calculus around kind of how interest rates might change that historically, but I think there's some positive tailwinds that these companies are more dominated, more profitable than we probably thought as well, five or 10 years ago when you might be anchoring to some of those historical multiples. And so net net, we think, what is that long term stabilization? And I think we're willing to kind of maintain that horizon. We want to be level headed. We want to be consistent in our approach around it, but also recognizing when kind of things change. So I think that's led us continuing to invest this year behind companies. And then I think on the early stage side, it doesn't really change it much. And I think if I find a lot of consistency around investors around matter, I hope so because these companies are going to exit over five or 10 year time horizon and what the NASDAQs trading on a given day shouldn't determine whether you think this company can succeed or not in terms of defying gravity and breaking into a market. During towards closing, talk about the future of thrive. Where could your firm go? I know you're going to be concentrating in category defining companies, but could you see yourselves launching any new fund products, whether it's hedge fund or other sort of fund products that you think about? Like aggregate is massive asset management firm beyond venture. We don't think of it necessarily like that. I think again, being annoying and kind of repeating kind of our firm philosophy, we want to be opportunistic, we want to be stage agnostic, we want to be geographically not saying they were product agnostic in a way, maybe it's part of your question. And again, we just want to be about this category to find companies with long term tailwinds. And I think one of our firm philosophies and values is focus on the inputs, not the outputs. And so I think we're going to keep focusing on, I think a more direct show on what the inputs at thrive are going to be. And that's really around obviously the people we're going to hire. And we want to bring people to the firm that still have that maverick mentality, the redefine in industry or learn about one of the most exciting things and kind of continue to push that forward. We're not insecure about betting on young people that might push our thinking at thrive. It would, you know, sometimes as firms get more successful, they try to overly professionalize and become corporate. We're trying to actively fight that. Josh found it thrive when he was 26. I joined thrive when I was 25. You know, a lot of the people at the firm kind of grew up at the firm. He was spent a lot of time developing and building talent. And so, you know, we want to bring a new generation of people. We're going to help us push our thinking and help the firm evolve. We don't want to lose sight of what we're trying to invest behind, but we don't have a road map around, you know, what the exact products that the firm was going to be around. And as you've seen, our bias has been to concentrate, stay lean, be focused and have a team that can be flexible to kind of invest across all those dimensions. And so, my vision for what thrives going forward is that we still are the most exciting people for young and ambitious talent that wants to take a bet on themselves and build something that they're joining thrive. And then we're going to let them help evolve and direct the firm going forward. So you mentioned that you're not afraid to take bets on young talent. And you've cultivated this amazing talent over there, some of which has stayed at thrive in some of which your own thing, whether it's Chris Pike or Miles at benchmark. Talk about how you think about talent differently than perhaps the venture industry typically thinks about it, why you're willing to make bets on these young people and how you exactly, you cultivate this talent. For us, if talent is the most important thing for your company, how can you outsource it to other people to develop it for you? And so we've taken a much more intentional view from day one that we're going to be less focused on coaching talent and much more on developing talent and growing talent. And so if you look at our team, especially our investment team, most people have zero to four years of experience before they join thrive. And we're really looking for a lot of intrinsic to kind of grow into what we're doing. And one is that we want people who have an independent mindset. We do things differently at thrive as we've kind of talked throughout this conversation. And we want someone who can be flexible and approach that, but be able to kind of push the boundaries of our own thinking and be able to live in a little bit of this ambiguity of investing early and investing in building companies. And I think it really takes a curious independent mind to embrace that. I think the person's also got to be hungry and have a little bit of that maverick intuition. They can't have been on the default path their whole life. They had to have challenged something on some way to get to a certain point before thrive. And I think that's just important because we want to continue to get better and redefine what we do. But also we want to be aligned with our founders. I mean, our founders are that DNA. And so it feels like it's ethical to us to have an investing firm where the DNA of the investors are really different than the DNA of the founders. And I think maybe that's why thrive blends the lines a lot between founding and investing. This building thrive, we build along our founders, we build new companies because we want that DNA. And hopefully that's why a lot of our founders feel a lot of resonance with the people on our team and our approach to the market. And I think the last thing is that we want a team that embraces collaboration. And so people who are very reflective, who can want engaging conversation, where it's not about winning the discussion, it's about learning from the discussion. There's an uncompromising pursuit of truth and how we do that and enough self confidence to be able to raise your hand and say when I'm wrong, but also to stick to your convictions when you're being challenged. And we think that leads to a really collaborative and sharpening environment. I think it's one of the things we benefit the most of of kind of having a small team is that I get to benefit from the wisdom of all my partners and team members as we're kind of pushing these things forward. I've never heard anyone say they've had a productive conversation with 30 people in the room. And so we want to avoid those dynamics where I excited to bring an investment forward and talk about it with the team. It's not a hook to jump through or I feel like I'm talking to partners who don't understand what I'm doing. And I think it's allowed us to kind of maintain this T-Ship generalist approach. I think on one hand you could say, oh, generalist approach must be frustrating because your other partners or investors aren't spending as much time with you in your space. They don't understand. If you're really large and you guys are out of sync, absolutely I can imagine someone saying that complaint. But I think being a small team that's very aligned, I find it very good because it keeps me out of the weeds on the things that I get excited about because it's not about is this interesting in the niche I've been exploring over the last six months is like, is this interesting globally? Is this interesting relative to all the companies we're seeing? Is this rise to the standard of some of the kind of companies we've invested before? And not we're going to give it some kind of handicap or discount because it's in a segment that you spend time in or maybe you just don't appreciate it. And so I have a team that kind of helps pull me out. And I think that magic's able to do it because we have a team that's engaged in that conversation in electoral honesty, but also kind of the structure of the firm that aligns around it. And then I think at the end of the day, and I think comes from Josh even at the early days of founding is we want to hire exceptional people who are multi-dimensional and give them a lot of latitude to run because we believe that the firm is shaped in every dimension, not just an investing team, but across every dimension by the individuals who feel empowered to kind of drive that forward. And we think the most talented people want to be in those environments. They don't want to be restricted. They don't want to be put in a box. They don't want to be siloed. They want to feel like they're part of a team kind of building something alongside each other. Yes, we might have different domains. Yes, we have different things that we spend time on. But I do think we are connected with an ethos of being a builder, wanting to be collaborative, hungry and curious about that journey. Yeah. It's fascinating because typically early companies or early firms have to take bets on younger people or that's where the best arbitrage is because they can't necessarily compete with the best companies on the most legible talent. But what's interesting about you guys is as you become transformed from an early firm to one of the top firms, you can now compete with every other firm for the most obvious, the most already accomplished investors. Yet you still choose to take bets on extremely talented, but perhaps younger or earlier in their career as you mentioned zero to four years. That's really interesting. Definitely. It's been an active tension because to your point, the natural pull is that as you become successful, you become more risk averse. And as become more risk averse, you go for people that you feel like you can assess have done the job before. And by the way, those people are interesting. And we talk all the time, thrive early days. It's self-selected for the people who are interested in it, who leave a big, comfortable job at a private equity firm or an investment firm and join thrive. Well, that's self-selected. The people who kind of had a lot of those characteristics were talking about they want to build something. They have a little bit of edge. They want to get off the default path. I think as we've grown, we've been surprised and humbled by people who have very accomplished resumes who are interested in what we're doing at thrive. And obviously, you're very flattered by it. And there's a lot of reason and pull to kind of do that. But I think we don't want to abandon what made us successful in the first place. And so how do we continue to keep that? And how do you fight some of that instinct to kind of become too institutionalized in a way. Not that it's exactly the same, but I'm sure founders, you know, we see founders go through this journey as, you know, the early team looks really different and then now you have a scalable company that attracts all these big execs from big name companies and you get the VP from Google or whoever. And some of those people obviously translate, but a lot of times you're almost flattered that something like this would be interesting, but they change the DNA of the company in a really significant way. And sometimes that's good and, you know, sometimes that's bad. And I think for us, we're just really anchored and make sure we never have the culture of the firm deviate too much from the culture of the founders we want to serve because I think that we're going to lose sight of the magic around that. And I think one of the things that makes venture hard but exciting is that it's only about the next exciting thing, right? It's a constant change in the new spaces that are exciting, the new founders are exciting, it's constantly recycling going forward. And so how do you make sure that you as a firm are aligned with that? And don't get left behind from that, get too distant from that because you do the natural thing around, you know, moving as this company grows, maybe becoming a little bit too institutional. Obviously there's things we got to grow up at and we're better at than we were when Thrive first started. Those are all good. But again, we don't want to lose the initial DNA that magic that enthusiasm around something new. And new people who are going to challenge and push us and not to try to get who locked into something. That magic is interesting. I sort of see your, you mentioned your sort of media strategy is to also like your company strategy, not do a ton of stuff. But this stuff you do do it really well, do it thoughtful, the Josh interview and invest like the best of that was fantastic. I think this interview has been fantastic. And I think the, it sort of lesses more, allows you to have some mystique to it. And if people just, if all they think about Thrive is just an exceptional company's exceptional experiences, exceptional insights, people may not necessarily know all the partners on a, on a first name basis, the way they might like founders fund because everyone is, you know, super out there, super on Twitter. But people actually appreciate this mystique to it. It has a certain magic to it. And, and they kind of assume the best because of it that everyone is super brilliant and just heads down and focused and, you know, founder first, too busy. Do you think the media strategy also contributes to the magic around the firm? But exceptionally kind to say all those things. And we're probably giving too much credit around some of the intentionality of these things. I think it really stems from trying to be heads down, trying to be focused. Early days, we were too insecure to say something, to be honest, right? We were trying to figure it out. We were young in the industry. And we didn't want to be talking about things that we don't know. And I think, you know, as our experience has grown, not that we figured out everything, not that we deserve to be out there talking all the time, we found that we just enjoy so much more being close to our companies. And again, like we just want the firm to be anchored in the assumption that like we're here to support our founders, work with our founders. Let's not get confused about what we're spending time on. I think there's a lot of people who put great content on the internet as investors. I think it's wonderful. I benefit a ton from it. I learned a lot of my journey from people who've been out there and sharing. And so I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But it's not the strategy we pursue. And we feel fortunate that it hasn't hurt us in the journey. And as you said, maybe it's actually helped us with a lot of founders. Yeah. Let's wrap on that. I'm grateful to you for sharing a bit of your journey building thrive with many investors and founders listening in. And I know that anytime I want to cap table with your thrive, that it's going to be a good situation that you guys are committed to it. And I've chosen a good one. So thanks so much for coming to the podcast. You're too kind, Eric. Really appreciate time. Fun conversation. Turpentine VC is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen and Econ 102. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store or read us in Spotify. [MUSIC PLAYING]